On Unrelated and Unparalleled Narratives, but Actually
I didn’t think I’d be able to run while listening to a podcast, but music isn’t doing much for me lately, and it turns out I can. For the last few weeks, my go-to has been My Favorite Murder, which if you haven’t listened to, is a comedy-true-crime podcast that explores various murders throughout history. I read the book first—Stay Sexy, Don’t Get Murdered—and it moves back and forth as two memoirs at once. The audio of the book is partially read live, and it’s a listen like butter. I’ll wait while you go listen to it right now, I’ll fucking wait. …
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The podcast and all the other true crime I’ve been devouring over quarantine has me thinking about dates. If a date of a murder or missing person is mentioned, such as, I don’t know, January 27th 2003, I do my very best to recollect what I was doing on that day. And while I was doing my thing on that day--probably skipping class to get a bacon, egg, and cheese muffin--did I know somebody was being murdered at that time? And what about today? Right now, something terrible is happening, and in three years Keith Morrison will be on Dateline saying, she went missing on July 29th, 2020. They found her body two weeks later.
When this shit is over (or worse? I won’t be that cynical), I hope in 2022 I think what was I doing on June 18th 2020? And it’ll be a gross, sad feeling but also the feeling of thank God I’m not doing that right now. Or well at least I wasn’t a Dateline story and super-murdered that day.
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I attempted suicide twenty years ago, in June, a few days before my 18th birthday, and rather than the traditional anniversary present of delicate China, I gifted a semicolon to my floral forearm tattoo sleeve. Honestly, it was an afterthought. I was getting a new tattoo anyway, and as my artist Steph was getting ready to wrap up my tender arm, I said oh, I’d like to add a semicolon, and she said cool and took a small pen to shape its design—we started small and got a little bigger and then just a little bigger—before she officially used her buzzing gun to make the dark dot and winking comma permanent. We hid it in the crevice of a mint leaf in the tattoo bouquet of herbs.
Steph didn’t ask about the semicolon, but I’m sure she’s tattooed them before. I’m ambivalent toward them as a punctuation mark; mostly my association is to X them out when students use them adorably and incorrectly—which they do 99% of the time—but semicolons have been claimed for mental health. When you see a semicolon on someone, there’s a large chance it means they have attempted suicide, know someone who has attempted suicide, or is vocal about overcoming the stigma of mental health. The rhetoric is the “almost stop.” Your life almost had a period at the end of the sentence, but—just kidding—you’re going to keep going. You were taking a big, quiet breath.
To see my semicolon, someone would have to look closely and know what it was about. It could be an accident—a dark pair of moles, an uncapped pen while I was grading papers, a small, sloppy vampire-spider bite. I feel the same way about my suicide as I feel about semicolons and as Leslie Knope feels about turtles: no opinion. It was impulsive, the pills were there because with multiple prescription changes I’d easily stockpiled them, my friend had called the police before I swallowed the plastic Barbie-doll-shoe mess of them, and I’d have been embarrassed for medics to arrive to a non-dying teenager. Honestly, it was so stupid it could be funny. Perhaps I have no opinion because I was numb when it happened and numbness is a trait of memory.
This has nothing to do with Covid, but maybe has something to do with 2020. At least something to do with dates. When I was in the hospital all-alive, maybe I thought what will I be doing twenty years from now? Surely, it couldn’t be anything so stupid as living through a pandemic.
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We start school before Labor Day this year—August 31st—and teacher workshop starts the week before. Nobody knows what this will look like, yet, and I’ve spent a good portion of the summer texting with my work friends (we used to be labeled in our phones as the “SDC,” the Snow Day Club, because of our obsession with free days off, and then we evolved to the Apocalypse Club, but that got too dark, so I named us “SFC,” the Super Fucking Chill club, which was my mantra through 4th quarter distance learning) about our classroom-fate.
A lot of people not in Education have a lot of fun opinions about public school teachers right now. The running favorite of conservatives is that teachers are lazy and “if they don’t want to go back, we will find someone else to do their job.” There is nobody else to do our job. There are no subs to step in to the Covid factory of our classrooms. "Well, we can just get people from the community to do it, because anyone can teach, it's so easy. Teachers are selfish, teachers just don’t want to do their job, teachers don’t care about kids, or they'd go back." My favorite firestorm of an argument from conservatives is the “but what about the mental health of kids?” They didn’t care about that before. And since they do, let’s all agree this means we will fund more than one social worker for the 1600 teenagers in my building and the counselors who have a 400-700 student load. I can’t wait for the support, when we get back to normal.
Because “normal” must be something new, because normal wasn’t working. The perfect response is the letter the Richmond, VA teacher's union wrote to the school board, which addressed the bigger, more important questions:
We're mad at schools because we need childcare. Why aren't places of work providing this? We're mad because students won't get fed. Why aren't other government agencies feeding our children? We're mad because without school the economy will suffer. Why the actual fuck is public schooling tied to the economy?
I’m thinking of the argument that happened after Parkland about giving teachers guns in order to protect ourselves from school shooters. I’m thinking of the likelihood of a school shooting. I’m thinking of the likelihood of contracting Covid. I know guns are an almost guarantee kill and lungs are not, but I'm still thinking about it.
Voters approved a lot of money for enhancing school security. I know that when people were fired up about giving some willing teachers guns (this was not literally entertained in my district) we were faced with the ethical dilemma of: could you kill a student? And Would you jump in front of a bullet to save a student? Could I kill someone with a gun? I'd panic and miss. Would I save a student? Depends on the student. I suppose I’d take a bullet for Ben, but…I’d hesitate about even a flesh wound for Matt, and the hesitation would be enough for the choice to be made for me.
Could I live with myself if I gave Covid to a student (it would not be one, it would be multiple)? And when we’re looking at risk assessment, is it really risk assessment if someone is making that choice for me? And how likely is it that Matt would give me Covid first, because he seems like a Covid kind of kid.
Meanwhile, as all of 2020, we will play this game of wait and see, which is a game nobody likes and nobody wins. Like fucking Candyland, which promises no real candy and ends with the trump card, that terrible Queen Frostine. (Who has become weirdly sexualized in the new versions because of-fucking-course she has).
I wonder if my new quarantine goal might be to become Queen Frostine. In that I mean Queen of Frosting.
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The joke of a First Lady has decided to redo the White House rose garden in quite the typical tone-deaf way of 2020. This would be an apt metaphor, but these things aren’t metaphors anymore: The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
I have been attempting to salvage lately, by means of foliage. I found some $3 salvia plants and threw them in the ground for the hell of it, to see if they’d magically come back to life, and there are a couple of brown toothbrush bristles turning into purple toothbrush bristles. I spent a deal of time pinching and dead-heading a hanging purple petunia plant that I got from the Almost-dead, Good-luck section at Lowe’s. It’s kind of still alive. Like most of the bunches on my deck, it dies in the middle and the crusty stems gather there, but it flowers at the edges. If you look over the tops, most of my flowers have gone bald like Friar Tuck.
I could turn them into beautiful platters instead of planters—pour nacho cheese in the middle.
Most of the begonias in the window boxes died and went bald in a way similar to the flowers. I overwatered them or we didn’t drill the drainage holes big enough, or both. There aren’t many flowers left to buy in July, so I added decent-looking fakes among the still-livings. It’s the only way to live with the fail.
If I’d had to look at spider-webbed, sad drooping begonias every day I’d lose it.
Are fake flowers dead flowers?
The hydrangeas are holding on. I was nervous because they were crisping, so I put the sprinkler on them, and then we realized the sprinkler was over the one part of the basement we hadn’t spent ten grand waterproofing, so it got wet in the scary closet part and we had to throw the large rug away. Even the Cactus, our R2-D2-sized dehumidifier, took a few days to dry it. Luckily, the basement doesn’t get wet when it rains, only when I put my manmade disaster on it. There are better ways to water the hydrangeas, and I’m learning as I go, but more importantly, this means I have decided to put the current living room rug downstairs, and now I get a new rug, and I really need something new to tie the room together.
Because I can’t tie shit together right now.